April 4, 2025 • 12 mins
In this episode of Golf Fitness Bomb Squad, host Chris Finn discusses the relationship between strength training and golf performance, particularly focusing on how much weight golfers need to lift to gain speed. He shares insights from extensive research conducted with over 15,000 golfers, emphasizing the importance of strength thresholds and the diminishing returns of excessive lifting. Finn also critiques the relevance of peer-reviewed research in the context of golf training, arguing that much of it is not applicable to the average golfer. He concludes by providing guidelines for strength goals and the importance of maintaining a balance between strength and speed to prevent injuries.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chris fit is ruiny the game, teaching these guys to
get bigger and stronger and faster, and we're going to
blade him just a fantastic Christ of the Fast that
it doesn't get old. Welome to the golf in this
bomb squat. I'm your host, Chris Finn, and today we're
(00:21):
going to talk about a recent post that we made
p for US Golf that got a lot of attention
and some haters out there, or at least people questioning,
so I wanted to address that today on today's episode.
It is about how much weight do you actually need
to lift for as a golfer to gain speed? So
(00:43):
based on all the internal research that we do, so
we if you don't know, we have over fifteen thousand
golfers in our database. We have one time data as
well as change data, meaning we test a golfer initially,
we then implement a training program and then we retest
to see what changed, and then we will implement something else,
so then we'll retest again and we'll see what changed again.
(01:05):
And we have this, you know, three four test points
over the course of a year, and we have many
golfers who've been with us for many years, five plus years,
a lot of data. As it were. The post we
made was based actually off of a tweet I had
put out that when it comes to deadlifting, once you
(01:27):
hit one point seventy five times your body weight, you
are good enough, as it were, right and as it
relates to club at speed, meaning that if you could
if you weigh you know, we'll say one hundred pounds
and you could deadlift one hundred and seventy five pounds,
or if you weigh two hundred pounds and you could, well,
(01:51):
let's say so twenty times six is one twenty, so
that'd be three three fifty a hand. We're gonna do
some quick math for those of you who are quicker
at math. My brain is h is having a little
bit of a far here. It is, yeah, three fifty, Okay,
that's what I thought. So three fifty would be if
you are, you know, one point seventy five times boduated
(02:13):
as a two hundred pound person. So basically, once you
hit those numbers, you're able to do those What we
have found is that implementing other or focusing on other
areas will give you a better return on time investment
when it comes to club at speed then uh, you know,
as opposed to like trying to go from three fifty
(02:33):
to four hundred, let's say, right go into a two X.
And the reason that that is is because there does
you know, as with any everything in the world, there
comes a point of diminishing return. And so that's where
we have kind of seen it land for deadlifting. Now,
some of the other comments were about, you know, squatting
or bench pressing. So I mean, so we'll give you
(02:54):
those two here too. One point five times body weight
for back squats and these are deadlifts with a straight bar,
traditional front backspotting with a barbell, and then one point
twenty five times body weight for a bench press. So
those are the numbers that we're seeing at this point. Well,
they change, they may there's some stuff that we thought
we had good data on, you know, five years ago,
(03:15):
which we think is different now. For instance, a shot
put power test really doesn't mean anything unlast year seated
just pass your or the leap changes because there's correlation
and there's causation, right, So this is where we just
see the correlation between club at speed gains and strength
kind of start to diminish where we don't really see
(03:37):
that as big of a relationship. So that was the
post and that's where it came from. Some of the questions.
And I want to dive into this a little bit
because some of the posts that came out or the
comments were around, well let me see your research, or
is there a peer reviewed my favorite, is there a
peer reviewed article that you can connect this to. For
(03:59):
those of you who don't know, peer review journal is
something that basically you have to apply, like send your
study into. You have to write it in a very
particular format. You have to generally have internal review board approval,
which I either you get them through university or you
pay for it as an independent party, and then you
(04:21):
have to go through all these reviews and all these
academia people tell you that you got to write it
a certain way, and it's like, literally, I have a
peer reviewed published article that I did a while ago,
should a number of years ago, and I will argue
it was the biggest waste of time that I ever did.
It's just it was like I had a peer reviewed
article of a review of tons of research, and I
(04:44):
was like cool, Like you put it all together, but
like I don't know the whole idea of this peer
reviewed it. It started becoming really really big when I
was coming out of grad school. That was a transition
to the doctor to physical therapy and they're like, oh,
you're gonna get all this other research that you get.
Like that was like I could, literally I have my
master's of physical therapy. They offered me. I was the
(05:04):
last class that had a master's. You could say, hey,
you can get a doctor ate. Now you come back
for a year, you pay ten or twenty grand, and
you take three courses on research. I was like, well,
how does that help me at all of my clinical practice? Zero?
So obviously I didn't do it, But now that's a
big part of like the thing out there right. The
whole thing in physical therapy was We're going to get
(05:25):
everybody to be a doctor of physical therapy and our
reimbursement rates will go up. How's that working out? Not
very good? So, you know, long story short, the idea
behind peer reviewed research. What I want to talk about
is like what is peer reviewed research? And how do
you know, as the golfer listening to this, like what
(05:46):
is good data? What is bad data? At the end
of the day, the idea behind peer of your research
is one hundred percent legitimate that hey, you should have
your data reviewed by a third party. Basically, it's going to,
you know, see if it's valid. It's going to see
if your statistics were done correctly, where your methods, you know,
truly done in a scientific way, where you are truly
(06:09):
measuring for that one singular variable. But I think at
the end of the day, really the people that publish
if we look at basic human nature, whereas incentivization typically
will drive behavior. So the large majority of peer viewed
research is not done in the field. It's done by
academic academics in a collegiate setting. So we're talking golf.
(06:31):
Most of the peer view journal studies are done on
college kids and groups of ten to twenty because that's
as big as the golf teams are. And so there's
on these people ages eighteen to twenty four that have
zero relevance to the actual golfers who need it. Who are,
you know, forty fifty, sixty, seventy eighty years old, And
the training methods for those people are generally going to
(06:53):
be different than the college kids. It's kind of stupid
research if you ask me, in terms of the the
ability to actually transition or transferred to as useful information
for the older population. For the majority of golfers out there,
it's kind of like only doing research on p and
LPGA tour professionals and then trying to say that, hey,
(07:16):
this is what amateur should do, Like will there be
carryover and will some principles be identified one hundred percent?
But in terms of true what is truly possible with
a fifty five sixty five year old amateur golfer ten
handicap who has a knee replacement? What can we expect
in terms of speed gains after a knee replacement versus
before and how the ground forces change before effort? Like
(07:38):
news flash, guys, that is not being done in an
academic stattic Like I mean, we talk about the challenges
of doing it that way to a find those people,
be get them to be compliant, see like like see
be able to recollect information and control for everything is
extremely hard. So I just find it funny when you
post something trying to help people. And obviously there's people
(08:00):
who are saying, hey, this is research and this is data,
and I get where it comes from. That there's a
lot of stuff out there that's done terribly. There's a
number of big training aid companies right now. Who a number,
There's one I can think of right now. I won't
they names, but like doing just some ridiculous stuff that
they're calling research. It's and it's becoming research. And this,
I think is the consumer is important to know that
(08:20):
research is used in a lot of marketing material because
you know, consumers want to know what's real, and the
average consumer doesn't know how to tell bs research from
actual data collection, research analysis, those sorts of things. So
we do everything internally, We do it all in house.
We have we are very transparent if people you know,
we actually have put out a number of different just
(08:41):
free PDFs with a number of the different studies that
we have done. But long story, all I said to say,
without you know, staying on that soapbox for too long.
For those of you who want to know, how strong
do you need to be and what should be a
goal that you strive for? You know, obviously get as
strong as you can. You know, if you get to
one point seven five times body weight and a dead left,
(09:03):
or one point five times body weight in a squad
or one point two five times body weight in a
bench press just maintain at that point, and you're probably
going to need to shift to focus to speed strength
like plometrics or reactive you know stuff like you know,
you may even go to velocity based training that we
have seen that be beneficial for people who are strong enough.
Most golfers velocity based training because we know what that is.
(09:26):
It's changing your loads based on how fast you're moving
that day. There are certain speed ranges for a rep
to occur that typically will mimic either like explosive training
strength training or hypercha fee training like we've actually we've
tested that and it really was not as effective as
just general strength training until that those strength thresholds were
(09:47):
actually met. So anyway, it was cool post, it was
fun to put out there. We'll be putting more of
those sorts of stats out there for you guys that
are relevant to you and hopefully give you some guidelines
of things to shoot for. One thing I do want
to mention is that, like that is not necessarily your
goal to get to one point seventy five. I've had
a couple guys like sixty five seventy being like, oh
my gosh, I got a lot of load, I got
(10:07):
a lift, I got a long way to go. Like
I thought, I was pretty good, right. If you're happy
with where you are, the most important thing is just
understanding where your clubhead speed is relative to where your
power and strength levels are. And as long as your
strength and power levels are within you know ten percentile
points of your clubhead speed. And this is what we have.
You know, if anyone's ever interested, I will say the
home assessment that we'll put the link in in the
(10:29):
show notes. So if you're just listening driving, go to
part for success dot com. It's on our homepage. It's
a free assessment. You can take it and you can
actually see how you do on the different physical tests
you know. We have off always off. We offer a
free call. We can actually tell you what percentiley you
are compared to other golfers your age. And what you're
trying to do is it's your game. It's basically a
game where you're trying to keep your strength and power
(10:51):
within about ten to fifteen percent of where your current
speed is. That till you know you're kind of in
a safe zone. If your speed gets way too above
where your strength and power or are where your mobility is,
that's when injuries start to occur more likely for you know,
those sorts of things to pop up. So, you know,
I just think like, while these, hopefully for those of
you who are strong and just don't know when to stop,
(11:14):
Hopefully this gives you an idea of like, hey, that's
good enough for those of you out there who are like, hey,
I'm really strong, I weigh two hundred pounds, I can
deadlift a one hundred pounds, Like, like, you got a
long way to go. There's a lot of gains to
be had. There's ceiling as high, you know, obviously there's
going to be unique situations or whatnot that take into consideration,
to take into account, you know, all that said to say,
(11:35):
one point seven five times bodyweight deadlift, one point five
times body weight backspot, all both with the barbell conventional
one point two five barbell bench press are the numbers
to go for. So hopefully you guys found that helpful.
Hopefully kind of give a little bit of insight in
terms of what research actually is and just be on
the lookout for kind of the fake stuff that's out there,
and definitely nothing wrong with asking questions. Just I don't know,
(11:59):
ademics kind of annoyed me when they ask those sorts
of things instead of like where's the peer reviewed research,
instead of asking like, hey, what was your sample size?
Do you have any day? Like like stats like those
are questions that are of interest in a value because
obviously the bigger the sample size, the bigger the study
was on, you know, the likelihood it's going to be
more applicable to more people. So as always think for
(12:19):
hanging out with me here on the Golf and Spouse
Squad and we'll catch on the next episode.
Chris fit is ruiny the game, teaching these guys to
get bigger and stronger and faster, and we're going to
blade him just a fantastic Christ of the Fast that
it doesn't get old. Welome to the golf in this
bomb squat. I'm your host, Chris Finn, and today we're
(00:21):
going to talk about a recent post that we made
p for US Golf that got a lot of attention
and some haters out there, or at least people questioning,
so I wanted to address that today on today's episode.
It is about how much weight do you actually need
to lift for as a golfer to gain speed? So
(00:43):
based on all the internal research that we do, so
we if you don't know, we have over fifteen thousand
golfers in our database. We have one time data as
well as change data, meaning we test a golfer initially,
we then implement a training program and then we retest
to see what changed, and then we will implement something else,
so then we'll retest again and we'll see what changed again.
(01:05):
And we have this, you know, three four test points
over the course of a year, and we have many
golfers who've been with us for many years, five plus years,
a lot of data. As it were. The post we
made was based actually off of a tweet I had
put out that when it comes to deadlifting, once you
(01:27):
hit one point seventy five times your body weight, you
are good enough, as it were, right and as it
relates to club at speed, meaning that if you could
if you weigh you know, we'll say one hundred pounds
and you could deadlift one hundred and seventy five pounds,
or if you weigh two hundred pounds and you could, well,
(01:51):
let's say so twenty times six is one twenty, so
that'd be three three fifty a hand. We're gonna do
some quick math for those of you who are quicker
at math. My brain is h is having a little
bit of a far here. It is, yeah, three fifty, Okay,
that's what I thought. So three fifty would be if
you are, you know, one point seventy five times boduated
(02:13):
as a two hundred pound person. So basically, once you
hit those numbers, you're able to do those What we
have found is that implementing other or focusing on other
areas will give you a better return on time investment
when it comes to club at speed then uh, you know,
as opposed to like trying to go from three fifty
(02:33):
to four hundred, let's say, right go into a two X.
And the reason that that is is because there does
you know, as with any everything in the world, there
comes a point of diminishing return. And so that's where
we have kind of seen it land for deadlifting. Now,
some of the other comments were about, you know, squatting
or bench pressing. So I mean, so we'll give you
(02:54):
those two here too. One point five times body weight
for back squats and these are deadlifts with a straight bar,
traditional front backspotting with a barbell, and then one point
twenty five times body weight for a bench press. So
those are the numbers that we're seeing at this point. Well,
they change, they may there's some stuff that we thought
we had good data on, you know, five years ago,
(03:15):
which we think is different now. For instance, a shot
put power test really doesn't mean anything unlast year seated
just pass your or the leap changes because there's correlation
and there's causation, right, So this is where we just
see the correlation between club at speed gains and strength
kind of start to diminish where we don't really see
(03:37):
that as big of a relationship. So that was the
post and that's where it came from. Some of the questions.
And I want to dive into this a little bit
because some of the posts that came out or the
comments were around, well let me see your research, or
is there a peer reviewed my favorite, is there a
peer reviewed article that you can connect this to. For
(03:59):
those of you who don't know, peer review journal is
something that basically you have to apply, like send your
study into. You have to write it in a very
particular format. You have to generally have internal review board approval,
which I either you get them through university or you
pay for it as an independent party, and then you
(04:21):
have to go through all these reviews and all these
academia people tell you that you got to write it
a certain way, and it's like, literally, I have a
peer reviewed published article that I did a while ago,
should a number of years ago, and I will argue
it was the biggest waste of time that I ever did.
It's just it was like I had a peer reviewed
article of a review of tons of research, and I
(04:44):
was like cool, Like you put it all together, but
like I don't know the whole idea of this peer
reviewed it. It started becoming really really big when I
was coming out of grad school. That was a transition
to the doctor to physical therapy and they're like, oh,
you're gonna get all this other research that you get.
Like that was like I could, literally I have my
master's of physical therapy. They offered me. I was the
(05:04):
last class that had a master's. You could say, hey,
you can get a doctor ate. Now you come back
for a year, you pay ten or twenty grand, and
you take three courses on research. I was like, well,
how does that help me at all of my clinical practice? Zero?
So obviously I didn't do it, But now that's a
big part of like the thing out there right. The
whole thing in physical therapy was We're going to get
(05:25):
everybody to be a doctor of physical therapy and our
reimbursement rates will go up. How's that working out? Not
very good? So, you know, long story short, the idea
behind peer reviewed research. What I want to talk about
is like what is peer reviewed research? And how do
you know, as the golfer listening to this, like what
(05:46):
is good data? What is bad data? At the end
of the day, the idea behind peer of your research
is one hundred percent legitimate that hey, you should have
your data reviewed by a third party. Basically, it's going to,
you know, see if it's valid. It's going to see
if your statistics were done correctly, where your methods, you know,
truly done in a scientific way, where you are truly
(06:09):
measuring for that one singular variable. But I think at
the end of the day, really the people that publish
if we look at basic human nature, whereas incentivization typically
will drive behavior. So the large majority of peer viewed
research is not done in the field. It's done by
academic academics in a collegiate setting. So we're talking golf.
(06:31):
Most of the peer view journal studies are done on
college kids and groups of ten to twenty because that's
as big as the golf teams are. And so there's
on these people ages eighteen to twenty four that have
zero relevance to the actual golfers who need it. Who are,
you know, forty fifty, sixty, seventy eighty years old, And
the training methods for those people are generally going to
(06:53):
be different than the college kids. It's kind of stupid
research if you ask me, in terms of the the
ability to actually transition or transferred to as useful information
for the older population. For the majority of golfers out there,
it's kind of like only doing research on p and
LPGA tour professionals and then trying to say that, hey,
(07:16):
this is what amateur should do, Like will there be
carryover and will some principles be identified one hundred percent?
But in terms of true what is truly possible with
a fifty five sixty five year old amateur golfer ten
handicap who has a knee replacement? What can we expect
in terms of speed gains after a knee replacement versus
before and how the ground forces change before effort? Like
(07:38):
news flash, guys, that is not being done in an
academic stattic Like I mean, we talk about the challenges
of doing it that way to a find those people,
be get them to be compliant, see like like see
be able to recollect information and control for everything is
extremely hard. So I just find it funny when you
post something trying to help people. And obviously there's people
(08:00):
who are saying, hey, this is research and this is data,
and I get where it comes from. That there's a
lot of stuff out there that's done terribly. There's a
number of big training aid companies right now. Who a number,
There's one I can think of right now. I won't
they names, but like doing just some ridiculous stuff that
they're calling research. It's and it's becoming research. And this,
I think is the consumer is important to know that
(08:20):
research is used in a lot of marketing material because
you know, consumers want to know what's real, and the
average consumer doesn't know how to tell bs research from
actual data collection, research analysis, those sorts of things. So
we do everything internally, We do it all in house.
We have we are very transparent if people you know,
we actually have put out a number of different just
(08:41):
free PDFs with a number of the different studies that
we have done. But long story, all I said to say,
without you know, staying on that soapbox for too long.
For those of you who want to know, how strong
do you need to be and what should be a
goal that you strive for? You know, obviously get as
strong as you can. You know, if you get to
one point seven five times body weight and a dead left,
(09:03):
or one point five times body weight in a squad
or one point two five times body weight in a
bench press just maintain at that point, and you're probably
going to need to shift to focus to speed strength
like plometrics or reactive you know stuff like you know,
you may even go to velocity based training that we
have seen that be beneficial for people who are strong enough.
Most golfers velocity based training because we know what that is.
(09:26):
It's changing your loads based on how fast you're moving
that day. There are certain speed ranges for a rep
to occur that typically will mimic either like explosive training
strength training or hypercha fee training like we've actually we've
tested that and it really was not as effective as
just general strength training until that those strength thresholds were
(09:47):
actually met. So anyway, it was cool post, it was
fun to put out there. We'll be putting more of
those sorts of stats out there for you guys that
are relevant to you and hopefully give you some guidelines
of things to shoot for. One thing I do want
to mention is that, like that is not necessarily your
goal to get to one point seventy five. I've had
a couple guys like sixty five seventy being like, oh
my gosh, I got a lot of load, I got
(10:07):
a lift, I got a long way to go. Like
I thought, I was pretty good, right. If you're happy
with where you are, the most important thing is just
understanding where your clubhead speed is relative to where your
power and strength levels are. And as long as your
strength and power levels are within you know ten percentile
points of your clubhead speed. And this is what we have.
You know, if anyone's ever interested, I will say the
home assessment that we'll put the link in in the
(10:29):
show notes. So if you're just listening driving, go to
part for success dot com. It's on our homepage. It's
a free assessment. You can take it and you can
actually see how you do on the different physical tests
you know. We have off always off. We offer a
free call. We can actually tell you what percentiley you
are compared to other golfers your age. And what you're
trying to do is it's your game. It's basically a
game where you're trying to keep your strength and power
(10:51):
within about ten to fifteen percent of where your current
speed is. That till you know you're kind of in
a safe zone. If your speed gets way too above
where your strength and power or are where your mobility is,
that's when injuries start to occur more likely for you know,
those sorts of things to pop up. So, you know,
I just think like, while these, hopefully for those of
you who are strong and just don't know when to stop,
(11:14):
Hopefully this gives you an idea of like, hey, that's
good enough for those of you out there who are like, hey,
I'm really strong, I weigh two hundred pounds, I can
deadlift a one hundred pounds, Like, like, you got a
long way to go. There's a lot of gains to
be had. There's ceiling as high, you know, obviously there's
going to be unique situations or whatnot that take into consideration,
to take into account, you know, all that said to say,
(11:35):
one point seven five times bodyweight deadlift, one point five
times body weight backspot, all both with the barbell conventional
one point two five barbell bench press are the numbers
to go for. So hopefully you guys found that helpful.
Hopefully kind of give a little bit of insight in
terms of what research actually is and just be on
the lookout for kind of the fake stuff that's out there,
and definitely nothing wrong with asking questions. Just I don't know,
(11:59):
ademics kind of annoyed me when they ask those sorts
of things instead of like where's the peer reviewed research,
instead of asking like, hey, what was your sample size?
Do you have any day? Like like stats like those
are questions that are of interest in a value because
obviously the bigger the sample size, the bigger the study
was on, you know, the likelihood it's going to be
more applicable to more people. So as always think for
(12:19):
hanging out with me here on the Golf and Spouse
Squad and we'll catch on the next episode.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!